A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation law restricting drug-company access to some information about doctors’ prescription-writing habits.
The ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston overturns a lower-court decision that said the confidentiality law unconstitutionally infringed on free speech.
Among other things, drug-company sales representatives use the information to target particular doctors and tailor their sales pitches. Patients’ names are not included in the data.
The United Nations has provided a snapshot of data regarding child accidents in their World Report on Child Injury Prevention 2008:
Top five causes of injury death
Road crashes: 260,000 children a year
Drowning: 175,000 children a year
Burns: 96,000 children a year
Falls: 47,000 children a year
Poisoning: 45,000 children each year
95% of injuries are said to be in developing countries, with Africa cited as the highest unintentional injury death environment for children. Europe has the lowest rates.
Although it is tempting to focus on terrorism in the news, this data is much more telling and useful in terms of actually improving global security.
Ironically I was recently asked to join a gift-giving drive and I found children asking for safety gear this Christmas (helmet and pads for skateboarding). I was more than happy to donate something I knew would help increase joy, while at the same time reducing the risk of injury.
I’m not talking about your belly button. The Navy CyberSpace Blog provides an anecdote about an anecdote that tries to make light of the word SHIT:
I said, “yes Sir, back in the days of wooden ships occasionally the cargo would be pressed cow manure stacked on pallets and placed in the hold. During the deployment the bilge would start to gain water and the hold would become very humid. The manure would start to decay and produce methane gas. When the Sailor would enter the space with a lantern the hold would explode. Once they realized the reason for these mysterious occurrences of fire they started to place banners on the sides of the pallets, (I demonstrated it graphically on the dry erase board) “Store High In Transit”. That Sir is the origin of the word, so feel free to express the word sh*t anytime you feel appropriate.” Everyone laughed and we got back to work.
The strange part of the story is how “The Admiral during one of his many questions said the word “Sh*t” which was followed by dead silence”. Dead silence? Why so uptight?
Anyway, this story illustrates humor as a key to authorization. The Admiral was allowed to use this word only after a humorous story has been provided.
I love the patchy humor (pun intended) from the F-Secure guys. What other incident team would have a blog title of You’ve Got Comment!
And of course when the person clicks the link, out comes YouTube! Er, I mean YuoTube… momentary dyslexia there… my bad. Which of course contains an “update” for your Adobe Flash player, because the site is so sure that your player is outdated. Don’t argue with its superior wisdom. And when you execute that file in your system… well, let’s just say you’ve gone and summoned his older brother — Net-Worm:W32/Koobface.CY.